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Seeing an Everyman in a Troublesome Despot

Anyone looking for a reason to take offense at Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Emperor Jones” does not have to search very hard.

The drama, which is currently in previews at the Irish Repertory Theater and opens on Sunday, is about Brutus Jones, a black American convicted of murder who escapes from a chain gang and becomes the despot of a tiny Caribbean island. It portrays blacks alternately as violent, superstitious and lazy, it includes symbols of primitivism like tom-toms and a witch doctor, and is written in dialect.

Jones’s opening lines are: “Who dare whistle dat way in my palace? Who dare wake up de emperor? I’ll git the hide frayled off some o’ you niggers sho’!” Some critics think the play is virtually unperformable in today’s culture. Ben Brantley, for example, wrote in The New York Times that “America has long passed the point where a straightforward production of ‘The Emperor Jones,’ with a black man delivering O’Neill’s dialectical speeches as written, could be other than embarrassing.”

Ciaran O’Reilly, the show’s director and co-founder of the Irish Rep, is aware of the awkward territory. “It’s a tricky subject for a white, Irish guy to be doing,” Mr. O’Reilly said during a break in rehearsals. His lip curled into a smile. “But that was what O’Neill did. He was a white Irish guy.”

The play caused a sensation when it was produced in New York in 1920. Charles Sidney Gilpin played Jones, and became the first black American to have a serious starring role in an all-white theater. The performance led to Gilpin’s recognition as one of the greatest stage actors of the era, and he considered the part the most full-bodied and complex of his career.

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John Douglas Thompson as Brutus Jones in ONeills play The Emperor Jones, which opens on Sunday at the Irish Repertory Theater in Chelsea.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Still, many blacks at the time were troubled. Local black newspapers around the country gave voice to those concerns. One article stated: “A writer for the New York Negro World calls attention to the fact that Charles Gilpin’s play, ‘The Emperor Jones,’ is very harmful to our people and says that it leaves an impression that the prejudiced South is prompting in various other ways. It is on the order of ‘Birth of a Nation,’ as far as the impression referred to is concerned."

Gilpin defended the drama as “a study in the psychology of fear as it works upon the mind of an ignorant man of superstitious tendencies.” Yet even he objected to the use of the word nigger, according to the book “Performing O’Neill: Conversations With Actors and Directors,” and substituted other words for it, much to O’Neill’s frustration.

(Two other legendary actors, Paul Robeson and James Earl Jones, also played the Emperor Jones.)

When the Wooster Group, the New York experimental troupe, staged the play in the 1990s, Jones was played by a white woman in shoe-polish blackface as a way of self-consciously referring to the racial issues.

Many applauded the innovative approach. But James V. Hatch, the co-author of “A History of African American Theater,” considered it an exercise in trendy postmodernism.

“O’Neill did a wonderful play,” Mr. Hatch said. The question is whether viewers today are “secure enough to see it without our personal prejudices about primitive blacks,” he said. “Are we ready for that?”

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Charles Sidney Gilpin, who played the lead role when "Emperor Jones" was produced in New York in 1920.Credit
New York Public Library at Lincoln Center

Mr. O’Reilly did not see the Wooster Group’s production. In any case, he was interested in delivering the play straight on. “It’s almost revolutionary to give exactly what O’Neill intended,” Mr. O’Reilly said.

For years “Emperor Jones” has had a grip on Mr. O’Reilly’s imagination. But the prospect was daunting. Aside from the racial material, there was the very physical problem of staging a production. “How do you work out a play that takes place in a man’s mind?” he asked.

Jones’s wandering through the jungle after being deposed is more of a journey into his psyche and soul. Among O’Neill’s inspirations were Carl Jung’s new theories about humanity’s collective unconscious, European Expressionism and Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness.”

Ultimately Mr. O’Reilly decided that puppets and masks (designed by Bob Flanagan) could give body to Jones’s visions: the men he killed; a slave auction block surrounded by Southern belles and dandies; chained Africans being brought to America in a slave ship.

Finding the right actor was the next challenge. When Mr. O’Reilly saw John Douglas Thompson perform, he knew he had found his man.

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Ciaran OReilly, who is directing The Emperor Jones.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Before saying yes, though, Mr. Thompson read the play a couple of times, and then researched the influences that led O’Neill to write it. Ultimately, he trusted O’Neill’s talent.

“I saw Brutus Jones as Everyman,” Mr. Thompson said. His ascent to power is the story of “a member of the disenfranchised who wants to become enfranchised by any means.” He added: “The universal themes in the play are not constricted by color or race. I found great humanity in this story, in this man to see redemption.”

Whether Jones does indeed find redemption is ambiguous. Mr. O’Reilly himself isn’t all that sure where he stands on the subject. “What exactly at the end of the play is he trying to say?” Mr. O’Reilly said of O’Neill. “I’m still waiting to see if we have a final answer.”

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He does agree with his starring actor that the play is not ultimately about blacks. “He could have written about the Irish people,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “Go back into our racial past and think of the famine ships coming in and British colonialization.” In his eyes, O’Neill’s decision to tell the story through a black character was “a brave choice.”

Even so, given some of the descriptions and the frequent use of ugly epithets, Mr. O’Reilly said, “I dreaded the first day of rehearsal.” But the nearly all-black cast was utterly comfortable with it, he added.

That same brutal language is likely to stir a wider range of emotions among the Repertory’s audience, which has tended to be mostly white. What’s more, viewers are seeing it at a time when the day’s headlines, for example about Guinea’s newest despot, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, echo elements of the play. Even Mr. Camara’s military jacket and cap eerily resemble the costume that Mr. Thompson wears as Emperor Jones.